Google is about to make European regulators happy.
The tech titan has finally agreed to remove disputed links from all of its domains, including Google.com, in response to right to be forgotten requests from European Union residents.
Sources with “direct knowledge of the matter” told the New York Times the change, which Google has yet to announce, will be in place sometime next month.
Europe’s top court ruled in May 2014 that people have the “right to be forgotten” online forcing Google to comply with requests from “ordinary people” to remove outdated links and irrelevant information from its search engine. The European Union Court of Justice, in its ruling, said search engines must either edit or erase online search results if they are found to violate a person’s privacy.
Google, in June 2015, posted an online form that Europeans can fill out to request deletion of online information. But that was not the end of the issue. EU privacy watchdogs drafted new rules for Google to follow in November 2014 demanding the search engine firm, when it receives a right to be forgotten request, remove the links from all Google search engines, not just its European search.
Google had been fighting the rules, saying European authorities do not have the right to govern its other search engines.
While Google has not said why it has capitulated on the issues, it is obvious the tech firm is tired of the ongoing legal battle which, eventually, would see the company facing some hefty fines from privacy regulators across the EU.
France in particular, for instance, has been the proverbial thorn in Google’s side. France’s Commission Nationale de L’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) last summer ordered the company to extend the ‘right to be forgotten’ law to all of its search results rather than just those in Europe after receiving hundreds of complaints from people who had submitted right to be forgotten requests that were not completely delisted by Google — meaning, the offending info could still be found on Google’s U.S. Web search.
Whether Google’s surrender to EU demands means its legal woes will finally end in Europe is not yet clear. Regulators from EU countries will still need to determine if the change means Google now complies with their privacy laws.
